Friday, May 22, 2009

For the moment, not much work is being done with Avatar Core. There are two main reasons 1) Busy with my day job (really busy) and 2) I'm not entirely sure where I want to go with the API.

The API is particularly important as JavaScript comes into play. There's two sides of Avatar Core with JavaScript. One side is the ability to provide a JavaScript API for talking with Avatar Core in SWF form (as seen in My Avatar Editor). The other side is being able to port the entire Avatar Core framework to JavaScript allowing for it to be used without the Flash dependency. And really, in general, it is good to have a solid, simple API for working with frameworks like this. The question is, how good is it now, and can it be "down-ported" to a less-capable environment gracefully. At the moment, I'm not sure, which is why I'm going to think about API direction for a bit before movin forward much more with improvements and other fixes, particularly what it means in terms of having a JavaScript implementation.

Sunday, May 3, 2009

A new release of Avatar Core is now available. This release is 0.0.5 beta. I figured it's far enough along now to take it out of alpha and bring it into beta, though I'll have to admit that kind of identification is fairly arbitrary (just look at how long Google tools remain in beta...).

For anyone wanting to keep track of project updates, I'd suggest not following this blog but instead keeping an eye on the Avatar Core project feeds of which there are a number to keep an eye on. I'll probably only update this blog moving forward with major releases or otherwise notably important news.

Next on my things to do is work on documentation. The API has already been updated, but I want to include better descriptions and getting started information on the wiki. Currently, a lot of the content there is no longer accurate.